Lois Bujold - The Sharing Knife - Beguilement

“You’ll do,” she said. “It’s clear you were ripped up unnatural, which accounts for the suddenness of the bleeding, but you’re healing about as quick as could be expected for someone so depleted, and your womb’s not hot. Fever’s a commoner killer in these things than bleeding, though less showy. You’ll have some blight-scarring in there, I guess, slow to heal like the ones on your neck, but not enough to stop you having other children, so you be more careful in future, Miss Bluefield.”

“Oh.” Fawn, looking back through clouds of regret, had not even thought ahead to her future fertility. “Does that happen to some women, after a miscarriage?”

“Sometimes. Or after a bad birth. Delicate parts in there. It amazes me the process works at all, when I think about all the things I’ve seen can go wrong.”

Fawn nodded, then reached to put away Dag’s blue-hilted knife, still lying on her bedroll atop her spare clothes.

“So,” said Mari in a carefully bland tone, “who’s the other half owner sides you of that knife’s priming? Some farm lout?”

Fawn’s jaw set. “Just me. The lout made it very clear he was giving it all to me. Which was why I was out on the road in the first place.”

“Farmers. I’ll never understand ‘em.”

“There are no Lakewalker louts?”

“Well…” Mari’s long, embarrassed drawl conceded the point.

Fawn reread the faded brown lettering on the bone blade. “Dag meant to drive this into his own heart someday. Didn’t he.” This Kauneo had intended that he should.

“Aye.”

Now he couldn’t. That was something, at least. “You have one, too.”

“Someone has to prime. Not everyone, but enough. Patrollers understand the need better.”

“Was Kauneo a patroller?”

“Didn’t Dag say?”

“He said she was a woman who’d died twenty years ago up northwest someplace.”

“That’s a bit close-mouthed even for him.” Mari sighed. “It’s not my place to tell his tales, but if you are to have the holding of that knife, farmer girl, you’d better understand what it is and where it comes from.”

“Yes,” said Fawn firmly, “please. I’m so tired of making stupid mistakes.”

Mari twitched a—provisionally—approving eyebrow at this. “Very well. I’ll give you what Dag would call the short tale.” Her long inhalation suggested it wasn’t going to be as short as all that, and Fawn sat cross-legged again, intent.

“Kauneo was Dag’s wife.”

A tremor of shock ran through Fawn. Shock, but not surprise, she realized. “I see.”

“She died at Wolf Ridge.”

“He hadn’t mentioned any Wolf Ridge to me. He just called it a bad malice war.”

Though there could be no such thing as a good malice war, Fawn suspected.

“Farmer girl, Dag doesn’t talk about Wolf Ridge to anyone. One of his several little quirks you have to get used to. You have to understand, Luthlia is the biggest, wildest hinterland of the seven, with the thinnest population of Lakewalkers to try to patrol it. Terrible patrolling—cold swamps and trackless woods and killing winters. The other hinterlands lend more young patrollers to Luthlia than to anywhere, but they still can’t keep up.

“Kauneo came from a tent of famously fierce patrollers up that way. She was very beautiful I guess—courted by everyone. Then this quiet, unassuming young patrol leader from the east, walking around the lake on his second training tour, stole her heart right out from under all of them.” A hint of pride colored her voice, and Fawn thought, Yes, she’s really his aunt. “He made plans to stay. They were string-bound—you farmers would say, married—and he got promoted to company captain.”

“Dag wasn’t always a patroller?” said Fawn.

Mari snorted. “That boy should have been a hinterland lieutenant by now, if he hadn’t… agh, anyway. Most of our patrols are more like hunts, and most turn up nothing. In fact, it’s possible to patrol all your life and never be in on a malice kill, by one chance or another. Dag has his ways of improving those odds for himself. But when a malice gets entrenched, when it goes to real war…

then we’re all making it up as we go along.”

She rose, stalked across the bedchamber to her washstand, poured a glass of water, and drank it down. She fell to pacing as she continued.

“Big malice slipped through the patrol patterns. It didn’t have many people to enslave up that way, no bandits like the malice you slew here. There are no farmers in Luthlia, nor anywhere north of the Dead Lake, save now and then some trapper or trader slips in that we escort out. But the malice did find wolves.

It did things to wolves. Wolf-men, man-wolves, dire wolves as big as ponies, with man-wits. By the time the thing was found, it had grown itself an army of wolves. The Luthlian patrollers sent out a call-up for help from neighbor hinterlands, but meanwhile, they were on their own.

“Dag’s company, fifty patrollers including Kauneo and a couple of her brothers, was sent to hold a ridge to cover the flank of another party trying to strike up the valley at the lair. The scouts led them to expect an attack of maybe fifty dire wolves. What they got was more like five hundred.”

Fawn’s breath drew in.

“In one hour Dag lost his hand, his wife, his company all but three, and the ridge. What he didn’t lose was the war, because in the hour they’d bought, the other group made it all the way through to the lair. When he woke up in the medicine tent, his whole life was burned up like a pyre, I guess. He didn’t take it well.

“In due course his dead wife’s tent folk despaired of him and sent him home.

Where he didn’t take it well some more. Then Fairbolt Crow, bless his bones—our camp captain, though he was just a company captain back then—got smart, or desperate, or furious, and dragged him off to Tripoint. Got some clever farmer artificer he knew there to make up the arm harness, and they went round and round on it till they hit on devices that worked. Dag practiced with his new bow till his fingers bled, pulled himself together to meet Fairbolt’s terms, and let me tell you Fairbolt didn’t cut him any slack, and was let back on patrol.

Where he has been ever since.

“Some ten or twelve sharing knives have passed through Dag’s hand since—people keep giving them to him because they’re pretty sure to get used—but he always kept that pair aside. The only mementos of Kauneo I know of that he didn’t shove away like they scorched him. So that’s the knife now in your keeping, farmer girl.”

Fawn held it up and drew it through her fingers. “You’d think it would be heavier.” Did I really want to know all this?

“Aye.” Mari sighed.

Fawn glanced curiously at Mari’s gray head. “Will you ever be a company captain?

You must have been patrolling for a long time.”

“I’ve had far less time in the field than Dag, actually, for all I’m twenty years older. I walked the woman’s path. I spent four or five years training as a girl—we must train up the girls, for all that fellows like Dag disapprove, because if ever our camps are attacked, it’ll be us and the old men defending them. I got string-bound, got blood-bound—had my children, that is—and then went back to patrolling. I expect to keep walking till my luck or my legs give out, five more years or ten, but I don’t care to deal with anything more fractious than a patrol, thank you. Then back to camp and play with my grandchildren and their children till it’s time to share. It will do, as a life.”

Fawn’s brow wrinkled. “Did you ever imagine another?” Or being thrown into another, as Fawn had been?

Mari cocked her head. “Can’t say as I ever did. Though I’d have my boy back first if I were given wishes.”